Ransacked houses, broken furniture, animal carcasses, damaged electrical appliances, pieces of broken bottles strewn around and terror-stricken faces bear witness to a large-scale vandalism carried out in over 40 houses in Rewara Baas in Raghunathgarh village here following a raid by the police in the early hours of Thursday on complaints of cow-slaughtering.
The police claim to have recovered 36 bovine carcasses and rescued six cows two days after Bakr Eid on July 15 in the village acting on a tip-off. Twelve persons have also been arrested in this connection and raids are on in search of at least ten more.
The locals, however, claim that a few hours after the raid in the village at 4 a.m. on Thursday, the police returned around noon along with hundreds of right-wing activists and ransacked the houses in the entire village. “The police along with the right-wing activists beat up the villagers, butchered their animals, broke the furniture and even misbehaved with the women. It all happened in the presence of the police. We were too terrorised to stop or question them and fled to the fields. We returned around noon today [on Friday] when the media and the social activists came to the village,” said Mohammad Akeel.
The team of social activists that visited the spot claimed that more than a hundred houses in the village were vandalised.
The villagers alleged that the police were harassing the innocent villagers instead of arresting the real culprits.
